The Illinois Learning Standards are state content standards that describe what students should know and be able to achieve in grades K-12. The challenge for the 2000-2001 school year was to produce performance standards that would indicate how well students should perform to meet the state standards. The performance standards describe how well students perform at various points on an educational development continuum. The continuum shows how students can demonstrate mastery of progressively more difficult content and cognitive skills over 10 incremental stages of development. Performance within each stage can be assessed by the extent to which students are meeting the standards (starting, approaching, meeting, exceeding). Performance standards include four essential elements: (1) performance descriptors, (2) performance levels, (3) assessment tasks, and (4) performance examples. The performance standards supplement the Illinois Learning Standards by providing sufficient detail and examples to enable teachers to establish appropriate grade-level performance expectations for students. The Illinois social science performance descriptors described in this booklet are for grades 1-5. The booklet consists of five sections: (1) "Introduction" (Design for Performance Standards; Vision for Social Science Performance; Intended Use and Interpretation); (2) "Social Science Performance Descriptors"; (3) "Glossary"; (4) "Relationship of Performance Descriptors to National and State Standards"; and (5) "References" (n=13). (BT)